‘Something happened to her in there, Cliff,’ Ma said. She was almost jaunty now, smoking away and getting down her third cup of tea. It was getting on to midday and watching her drink the muddy stuff made me think of something cold and wet in a ten-ounce glass.
‘Come on, Ma, I’ll run you home and you can tell me about it.’ We drove to Glebe and I bought her a beer in the pub opposite the trotting track. She said Annie settled down for a while after her second time inside, had a job and seemed steadier. But recently Ma had begun to have her doubts-she didn’t like the look of the men who called for the girl and she had the feeling that she was heading for trouble again. She finished her first beer and I ordered another; she had a wonderful bladder.
‘It’s the drugs I’m worried about. She swore to me that she was finished with them, but I don’t know.’
‘What do you want me to do, Ma? She must be a big girl now.’
‘She’s still a kid really. You know how to investigate people-just watch her for a day or two, see what her friends are like. And tell me if you think she’s back with the bleedin’ drugs.’
‘What will you do if she is?’
Suddenly she lost interest in the beer; there was a rough, flaky patch of skin near her nose, and she scratched it. To a turned-on eighteen-year-old she must have seemed like a survivor from the days of the Tudors. When she spoke her voice was shaky and tired. ‘You know, there was only ever one thing about me that Annie respected. Know what it was?’
I shook my head.
‘That I was born in London. She’s got a real thing about London, even reads about it. Anything on the telly about London she watches. Well, I’ve got a sister whose old man died a while back; and she hasn’t got anyone, and she’d love to see Annie. Been looking at her photos for years and reckons she’s the ant’s pants. She’d pay for Annie to go over and visit her. It’s the one thing that Annie’d toe the line for.’
‘You can’t bribe people to be good’, I said.
‘I know that, but it’s all I’ve got. I have to know what she’s up to so’s I can decide what to do.’
I told her the usual things-that she might not like what turned up or that I might not be able to find out anything at all. But she’d made her mind up that this was how she wanted to handle it. She insisted on giving me fifty dollars and when I protested she turned fierce.
‘I’m not bleedin’ broke, you know. I work for it, and I expect to pay for work done.’
I subsided. We finished our drinks and she left to walk home. I drove back to my place to have some lunch, re-arrange the bills in order of priority and kill the afternoon. Annie worked at a supermarket in Redfern, Ma had told me, and the strategy was to begin the surveillance that evening to determine whether little Annie was or was not treading the path of virtue. I had fruit and wine for lunch and walked it off in the park as the shadows lengthened. It was autumn, and the ground was just beginning to soften from the occasional rain and the afternoon wind had an edge-it was a nice time to walk.
At a quarter past five I was sitting in my car opposite the supermarket. It was Wednesday and traffic and business were light; the shop window was plastered with signs offering cheap mustard pickles and dish-washing liquid. Some of the signs were torn and flapping, as if idle hands and the wind had not believed their promises.
Ma had told me that I wouldn’t need a photograph to recognise Annie and she was right. When she came out at twenty to six she was recognisable from her walk; she still moved well, but there was something not proud about the way she carried her head. Her hair had darkened to a honey colour and she wore it short. In a lumpy cardigan and old jeans she headed across the pavement to a battered Datsun standing at the kerb; no-one stood aside for her and she had to push her way through. I saw her face as she got into the car; it was pale and clenched, knotted with anger and resentment.
The Datsun butted out into the traffic and I followed in my ancient Falcon like another old pensioner out for a stroll. We went down into Erskineville and the Datsun stopped outside a tattered terrace house mouldering away in the shadow of a sheet metal factory. A couple of blasts on the Datsun’s horn brought a tall, thin character out from the house. He wore denims and sneakers and had to bend himself twice to get into the back of the car. I noted down the number of the house and the street and then the game began again. I don’t do much tailing and I don’t particularly like it, it feels too much like driving in a funeral procession. The Datsun driver had bad manners; he cut in and bluffed out and raised several citizens’ blood pressure dangerously. I stuck close and we went through the Cross and into the roller coaster of Double Bay. The apartment buildings don’t look much from the outside, but the titles go for six figures; Annie and her mates were.. climbing the social ladder. The next stop was outside a newish three-storey job with a lot of white stones to slip on and the sort of trees that have the bark peeling off them. The beanpole got out this time, and went into the building for a few minutes. When he came back he had a woman with him; in high heels she must have stood close to six feet and the purple jumpsuit affair she wore showed the world that here was someone who thought well of her body. She slid into the back seat of the car like a cat going into its basket; as she snaked her spike-shoed foot in I realised that I’d been holding my breath. I let it go and followed the Datsun down the hill into the gathering gloom.
They parked a few blocks back from Oxford Street and walked up in two pairs. The car driver was a nuggety number in jeans and a short leather jacket. The clothes accentuated the width of his shoulders and he had an easy, rolling walk like a fighter before the punches get to him. He kept his distance from Annie who mooched along with her hands stuck in the back pocket of her jeans. The beanpole and the Flamingo pranced on up ahead and a good couple of feet apart. He had a long, narrow head and crisp, curling hair; the woman had a high-tone, up-market conceited strut. She didn’t talk and the first act of communication she made was to take twenty dollars from her shoulder bag and hand it to the shorter man. He went into the bottle shop of a pub on Oxford Street and came out with a couple of bottles. They moved on; Annie drew closer to the leather jacket, and the tall girl tossed back a mane of platinum hair and led them to a restaurant that boasted French cuisine. A menu taped to the window told me that no main dish came in at under fifteen dollars. Through the smoked glass I saw them arrange themselves around a table and take the top off the rose; it didn’t seem likely that they’d duck out the back so I walked up past Taylor Square to a pub that has draft Guinness and honest sandwiches. Forty minutes later I was back outside the restaurant and forty minutes after that they came out. There was no wine left over and the blonde had lost some of her aloofness. The guy in the leather jacket was rock steady but the others were showing some signs. They stood on the footpath and debated something for a few minutes while I watched from across the road. A police car cruised down the strip and the blonde jerked her head at it and said something uncomplimentary. Annie lit a cigarette and the flame in her cupped, shaking hands jerked and danced like a marionette. They settled the point and walked up to the Square to a disco dive with a sign outside that read: ‘Drinks till two and do what you want to do’.
It cost five dollars to go in which meant that this blonde, if she was still paying, was running up a fair bill for the night’s fun. For the five dollars you got strobe lights and dark corners, mirrors to hate yourself in and noise. The beat of the music coming over the amplifiers was regular to the point of monotony and about as loud as the guns at Passchendaele. It was early for the action at this sort of joint; a girl was dancing with another girl and three men were dancing together on the polished floor. A few people sat drinking in plump-cushioned booths and my foursome sat up at a long bar. There were mirrors behind the bar which had the prices of the drinks written on them in white paint-a scotch cost two dollars and fifty cents, a Bloody Mary cost three dollars. I sat at the far end of the bar and ordered a beer. It wasn’t an ideal place for a surveillance; alone and over thirty I stood out like a carthorse at the Melbourne Cup. Also I didn’t know what to make of it: Annie was out with some friends consuming alcohol, the fact that she had a bad case of the shakes and that three of the party looked as if they didn’t have fifty cents while the other was wearing five hundred dollars on her back was interesting, but nothing more.
We all had another drink or two and I was thinking about calling it a night when he came in. His platform soles lifted him up high enough for you to call him short; he had on a dark three-piece suit with a dark shirt and a white tie. His body was plump but his head was abnormally small, it looked as if it was trying to duck out of sight. He had a thin pasty face and stringy blonde hair, wispy on top and worn long. He looked as if he’d been made up out of leftover parts. He walked straight up to my party and the blonde bought him a green drink. They had a few giggles and then got down to what looked like serious talk, argument even. Annie shook her head a couple of times and Shorty downed his drink and made as if he was going to take the high dive off his stool. Then they all calmed down and the head shaking turned to nodding. Shorty got down and walked off towards a door with a sign
